Which Method is Best?
It is not our purpose in this book to promote one method over another. Thus, from our
perspective, it is not a question of choosing between intact methods; nor should the
presence of any method in this book be construed as an endorsement by us. Our
agnostic stance will no doubt irritate some of our readers. However, like Prahbu
(1990), we do not believe that there is a single best method. Further, it is not our
purpose to have you sift through the methods presented here in order to choose the
one with which you feel the most philosophically in tune. Instead, it is intended that
you will use what is here as a way to make explicit your own beliefs about the
teaching–learning process, beliefs based upon your experience and your professional
training, including the research you know about. Unless you become clear about your
beliefs, you will continue to make decisions that are conditioned rather than
conscious. Engaging with the professional beliefs of others in an ongoing manner is
also important for keeping your teaching practice alive. Furthermore, ‘if the teacher
engages in classroom activity with a sense of intellectual excitement, there is at least a
fair probability that learners will begin to participate in the excitement and to perceive
classroom lessons mainly as learning events—as experiences of growth for
themselves’ (Prabhu 1992: 239).
As time passes, new methods are created and others fall into disfavor. Rajagopalan
(2007) has observed that teachers experience ‘methods fatigue’ with the continual
coming and going of methodological fashions. This has not been our experience,
however. Our experience is that teachers always want to know what is new. They
know that teaching is difficult work, and they are always searching for ways to make
it more successful. It is also sometimes the case that methods or practices that fall into
disfavor in one era are resurrected in another. For instance, for many years, teachers
were told that they should never use the students’ native language in the classroom—
that they should never translate—even when all the students shared a language in
common. The motivation for this advice was to maximize students’ opportunities to
use the language they were studying. Associated with the Direct Method (see Chapter
3 ), this admonition arose because its immediate predecessor, the Grammar-Translation
Method (Chapter 2), made abundant use of translation (as the name suggests), but it
did not prepare students to communicate in the language of instruction. However,
these days such absolute proscriptions to avoid use of the students’ common language
have come under attack. For instance, Cook (2010) suggests that such a proscription
is isolationist and undermines the possibility for teachers and students to establish a
relationship between languages. Further, he notes, it also violates the pedagogical
principle of moving from the known (here the common language of the students) to
the unknown (the language the students are learning). This principle is firmly
embedded in Community Language Learning (Chapter 7), which makes use of
translation to establish meaning and correspondence between the languages. It should